Betrayed by his ninja clan and sentenced to death for the many lives he took while working for them, Gabimaru the Hollow accepts his fate. However, every attempt at execution has failed, leading them to call in Sagiri, a member of the Yamada Asaemon Clan of imperial executioners.
While Sagiri can carry out the task, she instead offers Gabimaru a chance to receive a full pardon for his crimes. He, along with other criminals sentenced to death, will be sent to the dangerous island of Shinsekyo to obtain the elixir of life for the shogun. However, with all previous expedition teams never being heard from again, this mysterious island is a death sentence in and of itself.
All fingers and flowers, Hell’s Paradise draws you in with visual flair, but keeps you in because it puts effort into actually crafting a unique place for the story to take place. If you are looking for more anime recommendations like Hell’s Paradise, head on down below.
Anime Like Hell’s Paradise
For Fans of Fighting to Live
Basilisk
When two warring ninja clans each find themselves supporting a different son of Hidetada Tokugawa as the next shogun, they each send 10 representatives to fight to the death. The winner of this fight not only gets Tokugawa support, but they earn the right to wipe out the other clan.
While Hell’s Paradise isn’t a battle royale series and instead, after a time, focuses on characters teaming up to survive instead, what Basilisk shares with Hell’s Paradise is superhuman characters with specialties.
Like the criminals and executioners in Hell’s Paradise all have some sort of violent specialization when it comes to fighting, Basilisk features the same – but with only ninjas. It’s “oops, all Gabimarus and Yuzurihas” in Basilisk as it follows the clan-based battle royale for survival between two rival ninja clans with a star-crossed lovers romance between the main characters. Each fighter has a particular special type of ninjutsu and it isn’t afraid to bring the graphic violence like Hell’s Paradise.
Gantz
Kei Kurono is an apathetic young man that, while waiting for his train, runs into a childhood friend. When a homeless man falls onto a track, his friend coaxes him into helping save his life.
Unfortunately, the train comes in and they both die.
When they both wake up, they are in a strange room with other recently deceased people and a big black ball that tells them to kill aliens in order to gain their freedom.
Both Gantz and Hell’s Paradise are bloody action anime in which characters are forced to do something and are likely to die trying. However, the key difference is mostly that Gantz leans sci-fi while Hell’s Paradise embraces a more fantasy supernatural genre with historical elements.
It is also worth noting that, while Hell’s Paradise follows criminals, they are all pretty likable. Gantz follows normal people from modern Tokyo, and most of them are pretty unlikable – but they are supposed to be unlikable since Gantz frequently kills 90 percent of the cast viciously.
If you enjoyed Hell’s Paradise for the amount of gore and the weird beings that they fight, Gantz offers more gore and similarly strange aliens.
Btooom!
Unemployed and living with his mother, Ryouta Sakamoto’s only real achievement is being the top player in Japan of a video game called Btooom!
However, one day he wakes up on an island with nothing but a small green crystal embedded in his hand.
He soon finds out that someone wants him and others players to play Btooom! for real if they want to live.
Both Btooom and Hell’s Paradise feature characters that are essentially exiled to an island to either complete a task or die trying. However, Btooom is a survival game, so the goal is not to “find something,” but rather to kill enough people so you can leave.
While both anime enjoy their graphic violence and miserable deaths, Btooom lacks any supernatural elements. It is more just throwing bombs at each other. Furthermore, its characters are all essentially just normal people with a variety of personalities.
Golden Kamuy
After surviving the brutal Russo-Japanese war, Sugimoto gained the nickname “the immortal”. However, he now seeks the promise of gold to the north in Hokkaido in order to provide for the blind wife and infant son of his comrade who died in the war.
Yet, during his hunt, he hears the tale of a hidden stash of gold belonging to criminals with a map made out of human skin. Dismissing it as a tale at first, he soon finds that the man who told him the story has those very same map-like tattoos.
Now on a race with a native Ainu girl whose father was murdered for the gold, they try to make it to the stash before the criminals.
Unlike Hell’s Paradise that is confined to a hunt for something on an island, Golden Kamuy and its targets could be anywhere in Japan. While Hell’s Paradise is looking for the elixir of immortality, Golden Kamuy is more your standard treasure hunt. They are looking for a criminals’ treasure, and often skinning people or stripping them down to piece together the map that is tattooed on them.
Both series take place in an older era of Japanese history and take a few liberties with the characters. However, while Hell’s Paradise goes big with how unrealistic many of its characters are, Golden Kamuy is a little more restrained in that they are realistic looking much of the time, but perform unrealistic feats at times.
For Fans of Dark Shounen Stories
Attack on Titan
Facing imminent extinction, humanity retreated behind a series of tall, thick walls to escape their most dangerous threat – massive human-like Titans with a taste for human flesh.
With an enemy that eats humanity for fun rather than food, they are constantly threatened. As such, it is the duty of every human to defend the species.
Enter Eren Yegaer who, after his village was destroyed by Titans breaching the outer wall, he and his adopted sister Mikasa join the Survey Corps. They are one of three factions of the military that scouts and combats Titans outside the walls.
After joining in the brutal war, Eren discovers a secret about himself that could unravel what the world thinks they know about Titans.
What does Mappa do with its time now that it has finally had to end Attack on Titan? They bring all their might to bear when it comes to animating Hell’s Paradise, I guess.
While they share an animation studio and high animation quality, both Hell’s Paradise and Attack on Titan tell shounen-like action stories, but aren’t afraid to kill characters and show the bloodier bits of battles.
There is that shounen hopefulness at times, but sometimes that hope ends in tears and a severed body parts. However, while both series put quite a bit of effort into its world building, Attack on Titan enjoys a more intricate and complex plot as it unfolds.
Jujutsu Kaisen
In order to gain more power, demons search for fragments of the legendary demon Sukuna to consume them.
One day, Yuuji Itadori, who just lost his grandfather, learns of this as he saves his school friends from being consumed by demons after they break the seal on one of the body parts of Sukuna that was at their school.
In order to stand a chance, he eats it, revealing himself as a rare vessel that can utilize and control the curse of Sukuna, meaning when he dies, Sukuna’s curse dies with him.
Both Hell’s Paradise and Jujutsu Kaisen are part of the newer “dark shounen” wave of anime adaptations where the stories are a bit darker, a bit more vicious with the violence, but are still shounen action anime and not dipping into the mature plots and vicious violence that seinen action offers.
Both series embrace a Japan where the supernatural exists and people have the powers to stand against them. In doing that, it shows off a series of interesting characters with unique powers that allow the battles to never get too stale.
Chainsaw Man
After his father’s death left him with a pile of debt, Denji and his pet devil Pochita struggle to pay it off. However, after the yakuza kills him, Pochita fuses himself with Denji’s corpse and he awakens as a Chainsaw Devil.
Found by government devil hunters, Denji is brought in to hunt other devils on an experimental squad where he is finally able to pursue his simple teenage dreams of eating good food and spending time with a cute girl.
Like I said about Jujutsu Kaisen, Chainsaw Man and Hell’s Paradise are similar in that they can both be describe as modern “darker shounen” stories.
Both of these series share a real passion for graphic violence. They like the guts and enjoy showing them to you, but still indulge in distinct visual flair to do it. However, Hell’s Paradise still creates shounen characters where you know the good guys because they are good albeit sometimes a little morally complicated. Alternatively, Chainsaw Man revels in making even its main characters be kind of amusingly shitty people.
For Fans of Feudal Era Viciousness
Dororo
In order to become indomitable on the battlefield, a samurai lord barters his son’s organs away to 48 demons and then abandons him.
However, his son doesn’t die. Instead, a medicine man saves him with primitive, but lethal prosthetics that allow him to hunt down the demons and regain his organs for an eventual battle with his father.
Perhaps what Hell’s Paradise and Dororo have most in common is they have immortal-seeming main characters that actually aren’t. Gabimaru uses his ninjutsu techniques to not die while Hyakkimaru… Well, as a remake of an older anime, a good, believable reason is never given for how he did not die as an infant.
While Hell’s Paradise doesn’t waste time showing you the gore and the darkness that it intends to showcase in its battles, Dororo plays it a little more coy at first. However, the series is actually a lot darker than you would expect.
If nothing else, both series are about feudal eras where monsters exist, at least in some places. You then watch unique characters take them out to collect particular things.
Blade of the Immortal
Manji is a swordsman who was cursed with eternal life. Growing upset with all the death he has created, he tries to get his mortality back by killing 100 evil men for every good person he had struck down.
On this journey, he meets a girl named Rin who seeks her own vengeance against a sword school that killed her family.
Together they journey, both trying to find their peace and prevent being consumed by revenge.
Both Hell’s Paradise follow a seemingly immortal male and his female companion as they carve their way through a series of unique enemies in a vicious Feudal era Japan.
While the biggest similarities between Hell’s Paradise and Blade of the Immortal in how much they love gory violence, they do have some key differences. Blade of the Immortal is more of a repentance/revenge story and thus prone to more melancholy and rage than Hell’s Paradise. Furthermore, Blade of the Immortal doesn’t share the same passion that Hell’s Paradise has with a vibrant color palate. The colorfulness of Hell’s Paradise makes this series look particularly bland in terms of color.
Shigurui
At the beginning of the Edo Era, a time of peace has descended over the land. The Lord Tokugawa Tadanaga, however, has decided to hold a fighting tournament with real steel instead of wooden swords.
Within this tournament, the one-armed Gennosuke and blind Seigen are set to face off.
As they were both disciples of Iwamoto Kogan, the greatest swordsman in all of Japan, both are determined to prove they are his rightful successor.
When the Shogun says do a thing, you go do a thing. In the case of both Shigurui and Hell’s Paradise, the thing the Shogun said to do is kind of a deadly situation where few will come out alive.
Unlike Hell’s Paradise that sends criminals to a dangerous and deadly island to get the elixir of immortality, Shigurui is about a Shogun arranging a tournament of live steel where two maimed samurai rivals are fighting to the death. The story proper is actually a flashback to what caused their maimings and why they are so angry with each other.
Hell’s Paradise enjoys brutality with its violence, but still has a very shounen-style story to it where there is action, but also comedy and hope. Shigurui is also graphically violent, but prevailingly bleak.
Katanagatari
In Edo era Japan, Shichika Yasuri practices one of the most unique sword styles among a culture of unique sword styles, a technique that uses his own body as a blade. As the seventh head of the style’s school, he lives in exile with his sister Nanami until the ambitious Togame barges into his life.
Togame tries to recruit him on her mission to collect the twelve unique swords known as the Deviant Blades for the shogunate. Interested by the girl more so than her mission, Yasuri accepts, only to later find the challenge in collecting these swords is defeating the legendary swordsmen that wield them.
Like Hell’s Paradise is “go to island, get elixir,” Katanagatari is “go travel, get swords.” However, for as simply as their plots can be described, they manage to turn simple stories in to amazing experiences with both the storytelling and the animation.
Both series are essentially about guys told to go get a thing, then having to fight a series of tough enemies to do so while traveling with a female companion of varying helpfulness. In Hell’s Paradise, everything tries to kill them. In Katanagatari, each sword has a wielder that needs to be defeated.
While Hell’s Paradise is unique in its designs, Katanagatari employs a distinct animation style overall that is stunning even in its simplicity. They do both share a love of vibrant colors, though.
Demon Slayer
After the death of his father, Tanjirou has taken up the role of the man of the home, supporting his mother and five siblings. However, after selling charcoal in town, he returns to tragedy.
All his family was brutally slaughtered, save for one of his sisters. Unfortunately, she has been attacked by a demon and mingled their blood, turning her into a demon as well.
However, she still shows signs of humanity, thrusting Tanjirou onto a quest to find a way to change his sister back and preserve what is left of his family.
Both Hell’s Paradise and Demon Slayer are fantasy feudal-set action anime that have a distinct style. They let their creativity shine in the designs you see in the characters and the world while also being beautifully animated when it comes to battle.
While Demon Slayer has some dark moments, it is more of a traditional shounen action anime. The hero is good and kind, you root for him, and even though he struggles, the hero always wins in shounen anime. Hell’s Paradise plays things a little less predictably.
Do you have more anime recommendations like Hell’s Paradise? Let fans know in the comments section below.
